Opinion
By Jeff Childers
08-31-24
🗞 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🗞
🪖🪖 Now that August is in the can, only two months remain until the most consequential election since Abe Lincoln was elected the first Republican President, starting a shocking stovepipe hat trend on men the Lincoln generation will never forget. Plus the whole Civil War and freeing the slaves thing. But this year is arguably even bigger than that consequential 1860 election, since this November’s election in the U.S. will probably be the most consequential election for the entire world.
We can clearly see forming the battle lines of the globalists’ counter-attack: worldwide censorship.
Let’s begin with two major speech disclosures this week. The first was a less-noticed interview. Former Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) reporter Marianne Klowak spoke recently at the National Citizens’ Inquiry (a Canadian anti-mandate group). Her talk was more of a confessional, as her tense voice dramatically described the irresistible pressure on reporters to conform during the pandemic and help spread government propaganda and misinformation.
For instance, Marianne explained how she was made to ignore vaccine-injured citizens who contacted her directly for help getting their stories out:
“I felt the crushing burden and the weight of their truth not being given a voice. I felt I had failed these people as a journalist. I had witnessed in a very short time a collapse of journalism, news gathering, and investigative reporting. The way I saw it, we were pushing propaganda. To define propaganda: it’s information, ideas, opinions or images that give one part of an argument, which are broadcast, published, in order to influence opinion.”
More well-covered was an astonishing letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent this week to Congressman Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Remarkably, the letter has received wide media coverage, such as in a USA Today op-ed headlined, “Republicans were right: Zuckerberg admits Biden administration censored your Facebook feed.”
Like Marianne’s clip, Zuckerberg’s letter was similarly confessional, since it began by admitting that during the pandemic, Facebook allowed the government to control the information it was permissible for U.S. citizens to receive. From Zuck’s letter:
Although Zuckerberg commendably owned the blame for bowing to the pressure, it’s not quite that simple. The government strongly suggested censorship, and Facebook understandably yielded to that pressure. This two-stepping was just a thinly disguised charade designed to give Biden’s officials plausible deniability that they never directly censored anybody. It’s just a dumb cover story and nobody believes it.
What big tech company could resist focused government pressure? That’s a nice platform you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it, cough, TikTok, cough. TikTok resisted and failed. Musk continues to resist, and he’s paying the price.
Anyway, and this may be the more significant point, Zuckerberg also expressed “regret” about demoting the true Hunter Biden laptop story, and disclosed that the FBI’s warning was not about the laptop per se, but more broadly about “Russian disinformation” related to the “Biden family and Burisma.”
Meaning, Biden’s bribery problems.
In other words, just like in any tinpot dictatorship, the Biden Administration successfully misused its domestic police force, the FBI, to control information about any politically embarrassing topic, not just “dangerous health misinformation” related to the pandemic.
🔥 Browstone’s terrific Jeffrey Tucker published a thought-provoking piece yesterday headlined, “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess?” One suspects that, especially given Zuckerberg’s recent personal re-branding efforts, the social media billionaire’s timing is less about complete charity and more about self-service. But still.
In his essay, Jeffrey Tucker made the enormously important observation that the government’s pandemic censorship interfered in literally thousands of U.S. elections, federal, state, and local, by suppressing anti-mandate candidates and promoting pro-narrative candidates. Tellingly, Tucker explained how Minnesota got its China-loving governor Tim Walz, since his electoral opponent, Republican Dr. Scott Jensen, was savagely suppressed on social media.
Tucker linked Dr. Jensen’s outraged reaction to Zuckerberg’s letter of confession:
CLIP: Scott Jensen on the Zuckerberg letter and election interference (11:31).
In the clip, Jensen explained, “when Mark Zuckerberg decided to come out and say, ‘my bad’ — this is huge. They got involved in political collusion. American citizens were treated like pawns, exhibiting Lemming-like behavior, massing together, not believing something like this was possible. Mark Zuckerberg just told you and me and billions of people around the world that Facebook made a mistake. The governments around the world created most of the conspiracies.”
On an aside, some of the country’s highest public servants have repeatedly assured me that election interference is the worst conceivable crime. I can’t wait for all the prosecutions.
🔥 Marianne Klowak and Mark Zuckerberg’s tardy confessions were welcome, but they were merely a garnish on the tableau we’re currently watching unfold around the Western world, as it races to achieve peak authoritarianism. Yesterday, CNN ran a story headlined, “Brazil begins to block X as Elon Musk’s feud with judge deepens.”
Straight from central casting (villains department) comes Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who appears to be a Brazilian law unto himself. The dispute began last month when Moraes ordered Twitter/X to subject itself to government controls or face criminal prosecution.
In response to those threats, Elon Musk refused to comply. The space billionaire promptly closed X’s offices in Brazil, to protect the company’s workers from being arrested. Judge de Moraes then ordered all of Starlink’s Brazilian bank accounts to be frozen, even though StarLink is a completely different company than Twitter with a completely different ownership structure—apparently just because Musk was involved.
Now it’s personal.
Musk then announced that StarLink, now unable to collect user fees, would provide internet service to Brazilians for free. De Moraes responded by ordering a bankrupting daily fine against any Brazilian citizen who accesses Twitter through StarLink or any other way. No Twitter for you!
“De Moraes’ defenders,” CNN reported, “have said his actions aimed at X have served to protect democracy.” Because, of course, the last thing democracy needs these days is citizens informing themselves outside of official government-controlled channels.
Brazil is becoming only the latest jurisdiction where free speech and free thought are under relentless assault by Western governments that were ostensibly originally organized to protect those very rights. Our survey begins by noting the developments in the birthplace of modern Western Civilization, Great Britain. Headline from yesterday’s UK Spectator:
How about Canada, that freedom-loving country where U.S. liberals used to flee to avoid being drafted? Last month’s headline from the Atlantic:
Or consider France, whose official slogan is “liberté, égalité, fraternité” —the first of which, liberté, means “freedom.” This week, French authorities criminally charged —meaning, a potential prison sentence— Telegram’s founder, for derivative speech offenses France was criticized this week by no less ironically a source than the (anti-Putin) Moscow Times:
Next, see Germany. July headline from Jurist:
In June, EU President Ursula von Leyen darkly warned that the “core tenets of our democracy” were under threat, so she unveiled plans for a “European Democracy Shield” — to counter online disinformation and foreign interference.
It’s going great! Headline, also from June, from Tech Policy Press:
Unsurprisingly, the study cited by Tech Policy’s article found that almost all speech censored by official government action in the EU wasn’t even illegal — not even under those country’s draconian speech laws:
🔥 How could this happen? How did we get here? First of all, during the pandemic, the government of the freedom-loving United States of America taught all these other governments how it’s done. Second, when you give unaccountable bureaucrats any laws to censor citizens, such as pandemic-era disinformation laws, they will always twist the speech laws to conform to whatever political shape is required to meet the needs of the controlling party’s next election cycle.
For instance, just two weeks ago, we watched EU technocrats try to twist their hate speech laws to stop Europeans from watching Elon Musk’s interview with President Donald Trump. They threatened Musk with the vague charge of “amplification of harmful content.” Fortunately, Musk told them to bugger off. Headline from Politico:
The fact that any speech law, sooner or later (usually sooner) will ultimately be abused is the precise reason why the Founders were so very perfectly clear when they drafted the First Amendment of our Constitution. In relevant part, it says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
No. Law. Zero, zilch, nada.
None. No laws. Not for hate speech, disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, or any other kind of speech inconvenient to the narrative, no matter how unfairly critical of the government it may be.
That’s why the U.S., more and more, once again, despite all odds and internal enemies, is becoming the world’s final, shaky redoubt of freedom. Because outside America, where our Constitution’s grace does not extend, the dark night of fascism falls once more, dimming the light of liberty to a faint flicker.
That’s why the upcoming U.S. election is also the most important election facing Brazilians, English, French, Germans, and all the rest, even though they won’t get to vote. (Well, not unless they illegally crossed the border and got hooked up with a good NGO, but that’s a different story.)
If America falls, liberty’s faint flicker will be fully and finally extinguished, social media will become neo-Pravda, and the world will fall into murky blackness where people routinely get jailed for tweeting a meme.
Having failed to cough up a new pandemic with which to plague the 2024 election cycle, global censorship has become the globalists’ last gasp. To me, it resembles another pandemic-style overreach, and, I believe, is doomed to fail. But they’re not going down without a fight.
The best news of all is that the enemies of freedom are terrified of free speech because it works. It’s our most effective weapon, and it’s the easiest weapon to deploy, because all we need do is keep talking.
They want a fight? A fight is exactly what they are going to get. Bring it.
Have a wonderful weekend! On Monday morning we will pick up the essential news threads as we head down the barrel of the last full month before voting begins. Get yourself ready.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
